Pluto, discovered in 1930 by Clyde Tombaugh, takes 248 years to go around the Sun on a stretched, tilted orbit: between about 30 and 49 times the Earth’s distance from the Sun, sometimes even closer than Neptune. It is smaller than our Moon, about 2,377 km across, and has five moons, the largest of which, Charon, is half its size. In 2015 the New Horizons probe revealed a heart-shaped plain of nitrogen ice, mountains of water ice and a hazy blue atmosphere. Sunlight takes several hours to reach it; at noon on Pluto the Sun is about a thousand times fainter than on Earth, yet still hundreds of times brighter than our full moon.
Where is Pluto now?
Computing…
Questions and answers
Can I see Pluto with a telescope?
Only with a fairly large amateur telescope, as a faint point that looks like a star and moves a little from night to night.
Is Pluto closer than Neptune sometimes?
Yes, for about 20 years of each orbit; it was last the case from 1979 to 1999. Their orbits never cross in space, so they cannot collide.
Where the numbers come from
Values refresh every second in your browser; the published data are checked every 10 minutes and updated several times a day.